Crooked Timber-blogger John Quiggin writes a rather defeatist piece called How dangerous is the European far-right? in which he, among other things, calls Marxism ‘a dead-end’. How one can talk about ‘Marxism’ as a political trend alongside, say, the Green parties, is a mystery, not just to me but also to the person who added this comment:
In Germany there’s a lot of crossover between Green ideas and Far Right. I’m inclined to think that has something to do with the petty bourgeois roots of both and is why we need a materialist class-based politics but as a dead-end Marxist I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Oh, dear: class-based! Some dirty word in this age of identity. But needed.